Eanáir (January) 2013 Edition


Cead Mile Failte!

Cead Mile Failte! Welcome to 2013! Are we ready for another exciting year? I look forward to where our adventures will take us this year and hope to see many of your lives change for the better in 2013 and see us grow into our own in the games we play. We have quite a bit of exciting things happening around the community so let me jump right into things.

The Gaiscioch Family

CookieZerg a Success!
Thousands of Cookies Arrived
Just In Time For The Holidays

So on the 17th of December we armed our cookie sheets and sent hundreds of cookies to Trion, ArenaNet, and ZeniMax. All three send their greatest praises and thanks. ArenaNet even posted some pictures of them. Tweets, Facebook Posts, and even comments on blogs praised us for our efforts. If you haven't taken the time to claim your participation in the event be sure to go to our website asap and mark your participation.

The Year To Come
So No Worldwide Reset, What's Next?

Here we are at the doorstep of 2013, the year that was predicted to never happen. Being the underdog is not always so bad. Nobody expects anything of you and yet every accomplishment is praised, every victory a championship, and every success a milestone. The media may have fed on fear and chaos to proclaim the end of the world in 2012, but it appears that 2013 is poised and ready to show us just what's in store.

So what's on the horizon in 2013? The Gaiscioch will launch it's 3rd Public Community Adventure titled The Chronicles of Tyria in Guild Wars 2 in February. I'll discuss this in a bit more detail below. We also will get a peek at ZeniMax Online's vision of the Elder Scrolls MMO which many of us have been waiting for since Morrowind hit store shelves. We have not officially decided whether or not we'll branch here but either way we'll provide you with some coverage as I know many of you love the Elder Scrolls series dearly. At the very least we'll have a Saighdear there.

In other news for 2013 it looks to be a very big year for console and pc gaming. We're looking at several big name reboots this year including the new Tomb Raider, (And a movie?), the new DmC: Devil May Cry, a game from Studio Ghibli called Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Sly Cooper makes a return to consoles after a long absence, Crysis 3 tries to evolve FPS's once again, Splinter Cell Blacklist hits shelves, Bioshock gets a 3rd, God of Wars shows off its... tech once again, the team behind Uncharted brings us the Last of Us, The Elder Scrolls goes online, Defiance blends TV and Gaming, and one of the games I'm looking forward to is Beyond: Two Souls from the creators of Heavy Rain and Indigo Prophecy.

2013 Meet-and-Greets
Gaiscioch Plans Raids On International Gaming Conferences in 2013

It should be one heck of a year at this year's conferences. One thing I'd like to try this year is to have meetups at each of the conferences this year. I think these are great social opportunities that members can get together and storm the conference floor together. So here's the conferences I plan to try to arrange meet-and-greets at:

I should be able to also get you into some VIP parties if I can build the Guest lists soon enough to get them to my contacts. I am also looking for some people willing to cover the conference by blog, video, or audio. I plan to launch a new side of Gaiscioch this year that will be a public facing journalistic site where we can review games, movies as well as give a bigger face to our blogs posted in the Gaiscioch site.

2013 Charity Events
Gaiscioch Care's Charity Events for 2013

With every year comes a new lineup of Charity Events for our family. This year we will be planning our Double-Up Stuffed Animal charity event for May. I may borrow a few volunteers to help me research charities in other areas. The ExtraLife event will likely be in October once again and the CookieZerg did really well during the holiday season and I think we should probably bump it up 1 week and send the first week of December. I look forward to our continued success with these charity events.

January Gaiscioch Family Summit

This months Gaiscioch family summit will be held on January 5th 2013 at 6pm pst. We will be touching on the topics within this newsletter as well as award a new commander their tome. Feel free to attend and participate in our Q&A session. I plan to record the session and make it available online via our soon to launch podcast feed.

RIFT

2013 Awards
RIFT Sweeps Expansion of the Year

Congratulations to Trion for their accomplishment of winning Massively.com's "Best Expansion" of 2012 award and toppling Mists of Pandaria, EVE Online's Retribution, and Riders of Rohan. Additionally they stole the Most Improved MMO award as well. They also snagged the "Best Expansion of 2012" award from ZAM. Congratulations go out to all of Trion and we hope our cookies found you well!

RIFT Events
Join one of our Weekly Events in RIFT

We have several weekly gatherings for various event types each week. Be sure to check our weekly calendar frequently for updates. Here are some of the events that are going on among the family.

  • Sunday @ 7PM PST - Join Thoel for a storytelling roleplay event
  • Monday @ 4:30PM PST - Join Seacoral for Hunt Rifts
  • Wednesday @ 6PM PST - Join Foghladha for the Assault of Storm Legion
  • Friday @ 4:30PM PST - Ask Seacoral about joining their Primeval Feast dungeon adventure.
  • Saturday @ 7AM PST - Join Sri for Crafting Rifts
  • Saturday @ 11AM PST - Ask Mok about joining their Primeval Feast dungeon adventure.
  • Saturday @ 2:30PM PST - Ask Mok about joining their Rise of the Phoenix dungeon adventure.
  • Saturday @ 7PM PST - Join Tashwen for the weekly raid quest completion.

Guild Wars 2

A New Public Community Adventure for 2013
The Chronicles of Tyria

The land of Tyria has befallen endless war since the awakening of Elder Dragons. Heroes from the far reaches of the land join forces to put an end to the reign of Zhaitan. Join us in this crusade across Tyria every Tuesday Night from 6-9PM PST as we play out each of the 5 chapters of the Chronicles of Tyria. This 26+ week event is broken into 5 parts to allow new players to jump in with ease. The first chapter begins in Queensdale and follows the defense of Kryta.

This event will be a bit different from the Tyrian Campaign. It will not be an exploration based event. Instead it will focus purely on skill point acquisition and meta events. We will also be exploring select Mini-Dungeons and even doing some story mode dungeons along the way.

We will be fielding multiple commanders, splitting up through the night and working together to unlock area's typically unavailable before victorious meta events. At the final event we will be breaking into smaller units to take on Zhaitan himself in the Arah dungeon.

My goal through this event is to walk people through the events and stories surrounding the world of Tyria all the while building community and getting people involved.

For more information please visit:
http://www.sanctumofrall.com/events/1349/

The Tuatha Grows
The Guild Wars 2 Tuatha Officially Launches

The Gaiscioch Family has always been about building strong player communities. The Tuatha which originally began in Dark Age of Camelot as an alliance has grown past a traditional "Alliance" into an "Extended Alliance". Through the years 107 guilds have joined the Tuatha. A Tuatha member gets all the benefits of being a Gaiscioch without being on the official in game roster. The Tuatha in Guild Wars 2 in just the few weeks we've been publicly recruiting guilds to join has grown from 10 guilds to 27 guilds. We hope to break the 50 mark by March 2013. I look forward to seeing our community grow and see more guilds gain strength from the support of our community. Be sure to hop over to our forums and welcome the new Tuatha members.

For more information about the Tuatha see:
http://www.gaiscioch.com/about/tuatha.html

The War Wages On
WvW Status Update

When Guild Wars 2 launched many of our family were driven away by queue's and technical issues surrounding WvW. I am pleased to announce that a lot of these issues have been resolved and it's quite rare to actually find Queues anywhere aside from Lions Arch. Even on event nights we can avoid Queues for the most part. At most players are waiting 15 minutes when all of the Tuatha slams into one zone. We have a wide range of events that take place every day. Come February ArenaNet has plans to launch a patch specifically for WvW. From the length of time they've been working on it we can assume it's pretty massive. Cross your fingers for some more real estate and unique borderlands. I would like to welcome anyone who has taken some time away from WvW to rejoin us at one of our WvW events and see what has changed.

  • Wednesday @ 6PM - with Grodin
  • Thursday @ 6PM - Tuatha Trinity Night! Our alliances big event!
  • Saturday @ 12AM - ClubGaiscioch with Foghladha
  • Saturday @ 8:30AM - with Clanorton
  • Saturday @ 3PM - Tuatha Guild HoL leads a WvW event
  • Saturday @ 6PM - Breaking the Ice with Spartan
  • Sunday @ 12AM - ClubGaiscioch with Foghladha
  • Sunday @ 6PM - with Grodin

This message is Jexia approved ;). If she enjoys WvW anyone can :D.

SanctumofRall.com Update
The Sanctum of Rall Community Site Undergoes Major Improvements

Since it's launch the Sanctum of Rall community site has slowly but surely been improved. It's been my lunchtime project for months. This month I managed to launch quite a few little scripts that make a world of difference. Some of these features include:

A SoR WvW Scoreboard

This is editable by anyone and can work one of 2 ways depending on who's entering information. You can place in just the current scores and progress or you can also add how many towers, keeps, castles, and supply camps are owned in each of the 4 WvW zones. This allows us to have information about our current campaign out of game. I have also syndicated this information to http://mos.millenium.org who keeps a overall standings for all of the servers.

The Event System

The Sanctum of Rall event system allows anyone who is registered to create an event on the Sanctum of Rall website. In addition I've added the ability for event leaders of Gaiscioch to syndicate their event to the sanctumofrall.com by clicking a single checkbox on the Gaiscioch event manager. Take a peak at: http://www.sanctumofrall.com/events/

The Realm War Section

I have built a way for guilds to report when, where, and how many they will have with them for each of the battlegrounds allowing a broad view of how many people we plan to have on each zone allowing others to schedule events into low population zones and find coverage in areas where there is none. Over the next month I plan to make a broad push to try to get guilds using this system. Take a peak at: http://www.sanctumofrall.com/realmwar/

I will be making several improvements to these systems over the next month. If you need to know the "Access Code" to register to SanctumofRall.com please log in to the Gaiscioch site and look on the right hand side under "Current WvW Scoreboard"

In Closing

This month will be a wonderful one for planning and building our future events. I may be a bit scarce as life has gotten a bit chaotic up here in my end of the neighborhood, but I should be available during business hours in the Office Channel in RaidCall. I hope you all have a great time this month and look forward to giving you some exciting news come next newsletter.

Slan Go Foill!
(Goodbye For Now)

Benjamin "Foghladha" Foley
Ceannard De Gaiscioch Treubh